Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 17:46:30 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: HAB: more on Brandom and Habermas (fwd)




the spoon collective
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 09:05:37 -0700
From: Eduardo Mendieta <mendietae-AT-usfca.edu>
To: owner-habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: more on Brandom and Habermas

Dear List Members:

1. Thank you to Josepth Heath for the detailed message.

2. Habermas' essay on Brandom with a response by Brandom, with a rebuttal
by him are announced as forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy.

3. About the colonization theory. This is hard to answer in few words. I
would not say Habermas has abandoned it, but at least he has had to
reformulate how he thinks this process of the submission of the lifeworld
to the imperatives of the systems level.

He can not abandon the thesis of the colonization of the lifeworld and
remain a critical theorist. He would have become a systems theorist ala
Luhmann, or Muench. At the same time, Habermas recognizes, as he did
already in the fifities and sixities, that the world has become too
complicated and differentiated to think that we can resolve the problems of
alienation by directly intervening in the economy or the state.

I think that the question, however, is motivated by the intuition that
Habermas seems to have gone soft on the critical age of his theory as he
talks less of colonization of lifeworld. This is an inevitable
extrapolation if you think of the last two or three book, meaning _Between
Facts and Norms_, _The Inclusion of the Other_ and the _Postnational
Constellation_, where he has given great attention and power to the
civilizing and even democratizing thrust of law.

Note how in his early writings Habermas saw juridification as a process of
colonization. Evidently this is contradicted by the more recent work I cite.

I think, therefore, that the point is to see how Habermas maintains the
critical age of his theory by discerning even in the systems level elements
of normativity...and this brings us around to Sellars and Brandom.

I would venture the following diagnostic. Habermas has realized that his
monumental TCA has become anachronistic. We have been overtaken by the
Information and Network society. Globalization has made everything
different. The end of the cold war, and all aftermath of the demise of the
socialist block, etc. etc. all of these have made the sociological
assumption of TCA non-synchronous. If we remember, that book was
conceptualized as a theory of rationalization of modern, industrial,
postconventional societies. TCA was about a theory of rationality as a
theory of modernity, and vice versa.

Globalized societies are very different, even if only because the
pathologies of modern societies have been exacerbated to the nth degree. In
light of this, Habermas, et al, have to re-think their diagnosis. Their
patient, and its ailments, are different and unprecdented.

A new foundation for the critical theory of globalized socities has to be
found, one which talks about alienation, exploitation, disenfranchisement
not as consequences of the rationalization of the life world, but as
consequences of the inapropriate and misguided rationalizatio of it by
unilateral and one dimensional imperatives.


Some many speech acts, open to communicative redemption or rejection. Hope
this has helped.
















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